You can't beat Norm's charts, but one can also reason out some of this stuff. Not quantitatively,
but relatively.

> It can be easy to misplay a hand which
> has a deviation at a large +/- count or to
> forget to surrender or even to miscalculate
> the total in your hand and fail to hit or
> stand accordingly.

While the amount of bet you have out certainly affects your cost, so does the delta between the ev for the two plays you could have made.

If you make an error on a departure that should have begun at +7, say, and the count is just +7 or +8, the "cost" could still be minimal, despite max bet, depending on how small or large the delta was at that point.

I think Ken Fuchs once did a study ( or maybe it was me, I can't recall) that showed that even if you ALWAYS made departures "off by 1", it made almost no difference. That?s the delta effect.

> If a player can
> estimate his error-rate, he could probably
> make use of this type of information.

> Also, you hear/read a lot about error-rate
> being a major factor in the
> complexity/simplicity debate with regards to
> how many indices you use or what level of a
> count you use, but has anyone simulated
> numbers for these scenarios? For example,
> comparing the I18 vs. the entire set of
> indices for a typical count like hi-lo but
> assuming the player playing all indices has
> double the error rate?

One way to look at this would be that the danger with playing a lot of indices might be in the confusion the obscure ones could cause that would make you misplay those that are more valuable, more common (e.g. the I18).

Although it would be comic/tragic to know an obscure index, have it finally come up after
years of play, and then "goof" it. ;-)

Regards,
John Auston